(Swans - June 1, 2009)
A brief flurry of Swans talking to each other -- Peter Byrne in Italy, Art Shay in
Chicago, and Gilles d'Aymery (our co-editor) in California. The argument concerned
patriotism and the right of citizens to rise to the occasion in defense
of the United States; the futility of trying to save the earth because
the earth will do just fine when we are all gone to dust; the necessity
of point-of-view journalism. We are a prickly bunch of individuals, we
Swans, and I think we recognize that and put up with our differences.
This is an example of unity in diversity, because we do have a goal: a
struggle to make writing real, relevant, fresh. Of course, the waters are
very choppy in these times, but we persist.

A very recent letter to President Obama by national
president of Veterans for Peace Mike Ferner arrived, and then a Grandmothers For Peace
e-mail asking that letters along Mike's theme be sent to them to make a big
package to present to the president. I got busy on my letter.

Okay, I'll get down to the question: have wars as heart-and-soul of
empire come to an end, or are we destined to live in the shadow of
competing empires forever and ever till we humans go over the high cliff?
Has the time come to stand up and shout, "Enough"? I think the time
has arrived. Here are my arguments.

World War II was a latecomer in the arena of wars in the service of empires,
that time begun by the Nazis and the Emperor-bound Japanese. I remember
lying in a US Army hospital in Italy, near the end of the war,
listening to Armed Forces Radio. The favorite song, requested time and
again, was Rum and Coca Cola (the refrain, "Workin' for the Yankee
Dollaaar"). Also, the fairly objective news reports of those times
included worries by United States attendees at the founding of the United
Nations concerning the Soviets. "What are they fussing about," I
thought. "The Soviets in their stubborn defense of Leningrad and their
launching gigantic tank battles ensured our success in the west and the
south ('Soft underbelly of Europe' as Churchill bragged). The Soviets are
our allies, aren't they?" And so began the Cold War.

I knew from my childhood in Teton County, eavesdropping on leading
citizens who spoke with admiration of Hitler and assuring each other that
Hitler would turn against the Communists. But it wasn't easy, in that
hospital bed, to have my patriotism called to the bar of justice by my
nation turning so quickly to betrayal of an ally.

Here's what Mike Ferner, national president of Veterans for Peace, has
to say, in the first paragraph of his letter to President Obama.

We have seen and heard and smelled and felt what "death from above"
actually means, not in a briefing report, but right there in our hands
and before our eyes.

This is Infantry's privilege: seeing, smelling, feeling, fearing. And
it is the privilege of all people, whether innocent or not, who find
themselves and their families on the killing grounds. Those horrors
don't go away.

Life doesn't have to be this way, children dying young on the
fields of battle. Yes, children, barely eighteen or early twenties.

Empires came and decayed for a very long time in human history,
fought for by horsemen, as with Genghis Khan and Tamerlane; as with
Syrian war chariots armed with scythes to mow down the enemy; as with
heavy-shielded Roman Legions; as with armored landlords in the medieval
years and down through the ages, down through the millennia since the late
arrival of us human animals. No wonder folks turned to God. Think of all
those memories, now turned to dust, of swords and spears and arrrows,
then muskets, then rifles, then the latest brands of artillery, and now
the drones. The Nazis had eighty-eights that could be aimed, not blasted
off as trajectories. In our invasion of Mexico in 1847 the United States
army had advanced artillery, the Mexican cavalry had lances. We killed
lots of civilians at Vera Cruz and other cities and towns, culminating in
our capture of Mexico Ciy, a slaughter that shocked Ulysses Grant, who
later went on to send enlisted men in mass assaults against Confederate
breastworks. Now we are using unmanned drones, guided by "pilots" based
in an airbase in Nevada. There are rumors of the ultimate weapon: drones
like Predator and Reaper that can make their own decisions: bomb or not bomb.

It is civilized and proper and timely to oppose wars in the service of
empire. One reason is that these huge destructive forces are not personal
as is the case with drive-by shootings, a deranged teenager shooting down
his classmates, rape, murder, torture. Wars tend to be abstract and
clumsy, planned and ordered by rulers, whether these men be Genghis Khan
or General Abercrombie, a Scottish Indian killer owned by the British
Empire, or George W. Bush.

In the modern version wars have been, and are, in the service of a
thoroughly silly economic theory, globalism -- aka Market Economy -- that is
abstract in the extreme. Market Economy, as Bill Clinton urged Milosevic
of Yugoslavia to adopt, is not god-given. It is an American, European,
Japanese invention. It has crept upon the world, capturing one nation
after another. The Nazis had a version, National Socialism hidden behind
violent racism and fear of Communism.

A friend in Wyoming wrote a fine book in the form of a novel, its
theme: Empires Always Die. A story hilarious in parts, tragic
overall, but true.

It is okay to be antiwar these days. It is the honorable thing to do.
So far that task is mainly left to us fringe people, people ignored for
the most part by the corporate domination of the media of each nation. We
thoroughly understand that empires cost too much in blood and treasure.
Wars are not necessary. That is something we Americans, especially, need
to get through our thoroughly indoctrinated heads. It is possible for we
Americans to make a last minute decision to oppose United States
Imperialism before it is too late. The precipice is near.

Sexism is very much bound up in war, as any enlisted woman in Iraq can
tell you. And the expenses of warfare by regular budgets and
"supplementals" and cost-plus contracts are, for United States citizens,
enormous. There is also the frantic search for oil and gas to keep the
permanent war economies afloat. But peak oil is near and these searches
are ruinous to the fabric of nations, of ecosystems. Are we doomed to
live only with animals such as dogs and cats and starlings and house
sparrows and spiders that happen to be pre-adapted to our ways of life?
That would be a lonely existence, wouldn't it?

The technology of "advanced" nations is formidable, and precarious.
Governments rely totally on tinkering with techno-fixes to combat climate
change and to keep the war machine alive and ready. This is total
subservience to the short-range nature of market economies, the bitter
fruit of mindless abstraction, an excuse for waiting to see what
profit-seeking corporations will do next.

Many citizens of the United States are extending the honeymoon,
waiting and waiting and waiting to see if Obama finally shows some
courage. For us folks on the fringes, Obama's honeymoon ended quite a
while ago. We can't help wondering if our "civilizations" have advanced
very far since the days of the Syrian or Egyptian or Babylonian or
Athenian or Roman or British empires. Maybe one foot far forward --
technics, science, medicine -- the other foot buried in the bloody mud of war.

In the seventh century before Christ, Homer wrote a masterpiece, The
Iliad. He, though rumored to be blind, must have somehow become
thoroughly acquainted with war, its smells, its bloated corpses, its
collaterals, its heroes sometimes turned cowards, its cost to ordinary
people. Near the end of this multifaceted book of war, a soldier speaks
up in a council of the invaders.

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